Like Exxon, Shell Knew What Was Coming More Than 40 Years Ago, But Just Kept On Lying, Greenwashing

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3. Can Confirm

All of the oil companies back in the 80s were quite aware of the impact of burning fossil fuels. I was a geosciences grad student in the early 1990s. My thesis advisor was a paleoclimatologist who was basically running atmospheric global circulation models. These models were used as oil exploration tools because they could identify areas where carbon sequestration was likely during certain periods of the geological past. It was far cheaper to pay profs and grad students to run these models then send exploration teams to the areas the models identified than it was to willy-nilly deploy exploration teams.

The academic community quickly figured out that the models often under predicted temperatures in the fossil record. They only plausible explanation was the amount of greenhouse gases varied over geological time. Your model says there are widespread ice sheets in the Cretaceous (a known warm era) adjust the CO2 in you model until you get no ice. Not coincidentally the model CO2 levels were surprisingly close to the air samples drawn from air bubbles trapped in amber from the Cretaceous.

We've long known the relationship between CO2 and earth temperatures. We've just allowed the media to bumble the big take away from the science and folks who have monetary interests in preventing change to hijack the discussion with their loud-mouth ways.